As the future of the Squeezebox seems uncertain, to say the least, several projects have emerged from the community. One of these projects, called ickStream will provide access to various music services to multiple devices including the Squeezebox.

The project is still ongoing and should be available later this year. This will offer an alternative if/when the official mysqueezebox site stops to exist, Squeezebox users will be able to continue enjoying their product and even include them in a larger ecosystem.

The ickStream team has made a pre-announcement on the slimdevices forum, as users started to wonder what would happen to the Squeezebox:

"Since some people seem to be getting a bit nervous about the current situation relating to Squeezebox products and are starting to abandon the Squeezebox and move to other music streaming platforms, we thought we would make a brief announcement that we have been working on something for a while. We initiated the project in 2011 when we started to see indications of the direction Logitech was moving in and have been working on it since then in parallel with our other activities.

We have seen the current trend in the market where hardware vendors are forced to do proprietary software solutions, typically resulting in users getting locked in to a specific vendor specific solutions with limited device choices for a good whole house audio experience. On top of this online streaming providers have to make proprietary integrations with each individual hardware platform to be able to offer their services everywhere, resulting in a fragmented experience. UPnP was supposed to be the solution to some of this but it really never worked for music.

Our belief is that people don't want to be locked into a specific hardware vendor, they want to have the option to combine hardware from different manufacturers in the same system, to use high-end devices in the main listening room and cheaper devices in kitchen or bedroom. We also believe people want to use locally stored music as well as music provided by online streaming services.

Our goal is to provide an open platform which can be integrated with third party hardware and also enhanced by third party software. We will provide controllers and players for iOS and Android ourselves, and in addition to this we are talking to hardware vendors. We have also done some prototyping of running our platform on Squeezeboxes and have a plugin that makes it possible to use LMS as content provider for local music. This way we want to make sure you can keep your Squeezeboxes alive even when Logitech ends the support for them.

The platform will be commercial because we don't think integration with online services and long term survival is possible without a charging, but our current intention is to try keep the community feeling from the Squeezebox community, where it's possible for third party developers to easily provide additions for free. To support this we will provide an API that can be used to extend the system we want that capability build into the DNA of the system and it's actually an area we are focusing on right now.

The current state of the platform is that we are doing some alpha testing with a selection of people from the community and the group of testers will be extended over time so we can release a first version available to the public sometime later this year.

Unfortunately we can't share more information than this at the moment, but feel free to post feedback in this thread if you know things we should think about to make the solution fit your setup better.

Finally, you are probably wondering who is part of this, so to give you some idea:- Joerg Schwieder (pippin): Developer of the iPeng app family for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch devices- Erland Isaksson (erland): Developer of many free and commercial plugins and applets for the Squeezebox- James Fearon: Developer of the playback logic in the iPeng app family- Remco Derksen (remd): Previously in charge of Partnerships and Business development for the Squeezebox.- Some of the other third party developers and some graphics/marketing/business oriented resources

You will find our web site at http://www.ickstream.com where we will provide more information of the platform as it becomes available.

Finally, please don't worry about our current Squeezebox related work. Both the iPeng apps and Erland's plugins/applets will continue to be supported and the new platform has of course taken some inspiration from our previous work as well as for the things we were not able to do on the Squeezebox platform in the past.